1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for setting up active networking of smart devices for providing a converged service and, more particularly, to a method of setting up, releasing, and changing a plurality of service sessions and a method of establishing a transmission path depending on the characteristics of service transmission data, which are based on a service virtual network composed of smart devices by extending an Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) so that a smart networking service working in conjunction with the SIP-based service of an existing infrastructure network can be supported.
2. Description of the Related Art
Ubiquitous networking denotes the capability to support a communication function in all objects and to enable networking to be performed in any form at anytime and anywhere in any type of environment, regardless of whether or not an agent of communication has been recognized. In such a ubiquitous networking environment, person-to-object and object-to-object communications may be supported by providing various types of applications and services required depending on place, time, and situations. A large number of standards for ubiquitous networking technology are under development, and the commercialization of related technology is also being conducted. However, since most standards developed in this manner are devised and applied to be usable only in a specific domain, a signaling conversion and system reconfiguration task is required so that dissimilar standards of different domains are compatible with each other to provide a converged service spanning across other domains. Therefore, new converged services must be able to be supported by adopting existing service signaling protocols that enable signaling to be conveniently extended and by extending and applying the service signaling protocols so that a smart service in which an application service is applied to other domains or in which different domain services are merged may be easily supported while working in conjunction with the application service of an existing infrastructure network in a future ubiquitous networking environment.
Representative application layer signaling protocols on an Internet Protocol (IP) network include H.323 of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Compared to H.323 using Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) Packed Encoding Rules (PER) encoding, SIP is advantageous in that it is a text-based protocol and is relatively uncomplicated, thus facilitating the implementation of the protocol. Further, SIP is a protocol for performing the function of setting up, releasing, and changing a session independent of transmission content so that it is applicable to services, such as multimedia conferences and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Such SIP has excellent scalability and is designed in a structure suitable for the configuration of a large-scale network.
Korean Patent No. 10-0498932 discloses technology for setting up a session in a wireless network composed of mobile nodes. This technology disclosed in the above Korean Patent merely presents various services based on a service virtual network composed of mobile devices using extended SIP without requiring an existing infrastructure network. However, this technology is limited in that it cannot provide a new smart converged service applied to different domains while working in conjunction with the SIP-based service of an existing infrastructure network.